Six weeks after the attacks of 7 October, with a punishing war in full swing, Jordan’s deputy prime minister issued a warning. “Hamas is an idea,” Ayman Safadi said. “It cannot be bombed out of existence.” Despite seven months of bombardment – or perhaps because of it – Hamas is today one of the most important nationalist and Islamic movements in the world. Its enemies denounce it as the equivalent of Islamic State. Its supporters call it “the resistance”. An offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that emerged from the refugee camps of Gaza in the 1980s, Hamas is an armed...